Laurie Blauner

Junk

I searched for what I didn’t need, another,
with too much dizzy distance all around.  Nothing
in its place, toys hived around my ankles with their
punitive plastic doll heads.  Meteors were fiercely everywhere.

How luminous you were, using your flagrant body
like a machine, circling around the adventure of things.
Throw it all out.  Start over on the disorganized staircase
that’s always been here.  We were flowers rearranged painfully.

Pushed this way and that we were saming the days, making a mess
of everything.  We juggled whatever we could find, the broken,
the useless, plucked debris among our beloved particles.  Air,
earth rotated, all of it leaning toward one world or another.

There was a different life somewhere, beginnings that
offered reclamation.  Now we run around space, trying
to remember human forms, cluttered with assumptions
that overwhelm us.  I could never find exactly what I needed.

Thank You for Your Attachments

We were blathering about chairs filled with ghosts
folded onto our chests.  On the beach waves gestured.
Clouds blurted out their own physical motions.  I was
a girly hazard.  My adjustments were biochemical, mathematically
exponential in that I didn’t like to be alone.  I straddled
every moment meant for accumulation.  But my
prosthetic eyes subtracted time.  A hinge of water
opened and closed on sand, rock that had been ground by
violent opportunities in the nearby city.  We laughed
about how we looked, husked ourselves.  I was the first one
in front of a slack mirror or positioned for a fight.
But I’d lost too many things to all those ideas from
our foggy conversations.  Light grew syrupy, stones
became disused skin.  When was I ever beautiful?  
When my hair flew into the sea?  In a raucous, naked
version of me?  One of us was shrieking as though
she’d swallowed some birds.  We discussed
everything we’d never need again, being absent-minded,
or fingers or toes.  But the truth was that we only wanted
more after the tables of our bodies understood pleasure.

Laurie Blauner is the author of seven books of poetry and four novels. Her most recent poetry book was It Looks Worse than I Am and her latest novel was The Solace of Monsters, which was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Fiction.